Eddie Macken

IRELAND is a country full of equestrian myths and legends and among her modern-day tales is that of a man who in the 1970s bestrode the world of international showjumping like a colossus.

Eddie Macken now lives in Canada, on the other side of the Atlantic from his beginnings in a small town in Co. Longford, but he has never been forgotten in his home country. In 2015, a project by 27 schoolchildren, which included his great niece, called for a statue in his honour to be erected in Granard, the place of his birth.

“I practised on the arms of chairs and taught myself to ride on the pony that worked on the farm”
EDDIE MACKEN ON HIS EARLY YEARS

It wasn’t only in Ireland that this unassuming man was a superstar. In 1982, the BBC made a documentary on his partnership with his great horse Boomerang and two years later, he was the subject of ITV’s This is Your Life.

Surprisingly, Eddie doesn’t come from a family of horsemen and he often insists that much of his success was due to being in the right place at the right time.

“We were farmers and butchers,